pariahdog

When it became clear that the film I was making was going to be about not just street dogs in Kolkata, but about people, the question of casting arose. Over the course of several visits to India I had slowly made connections with the animal lovers of the city, and made many friends who were passionate about animal welfare, very politically savvy, as well as relentless, systematic and precise in how they approached the problem of trying to alleviate the street dogs' suffering across the city. They knew statistics, they had plans of action. They knew the ins and outs of veterinary medicine, which they applied in emergency triage of street dogs everywhere they went. I met people on the other side of the coin as well, from the pedigree/dog show community in the city. The fact that there were multiple dog shows and pedigree dog clubs in a city with so many street dogs seemed to me to be an irreconcilable contradiction.

Initially I considered doing a piece about both groups. So many documentaries set in Kolkata, especially by foreign filmmakers, end up being "savior" pieces , shooting almost entirely in the slums, posing an unspoken question of "how can we save these people?" Even when filmmakers mean to do right by Kolkata, they sometimes use the city as shorthand for "the worst place on Earth," as in, "look, even here in Kolkata, the people are actually happy!" As a person who fell in love with this city, with all the good and bad that goes along with it, I knew that these pieces weren't doing justice to the complexity of life here. There were street dwellers and beggars, but there were also fancy shopping malls springing up around town, there was the incongruous image of a middle class man walking a dalmatian early in the morning, carrying a stick to ward off packs of street dogs taking offense at the intrusion, and there were the people of the fantastic universities in the city, which seemed to turn out students who were more mature and well-read than I remembered being in my own college days. I was determined to have middle-class Kolkata figure prominently in the film.

But as I met the activists and dog lovers of the city, I started to be introduced to another type of person. These men and women didn't act out of political ideology, but out of their own home-grown ideas of right and wrong. They didn't necessarily have a lot of context to give, but they completely devoted their lives to taking care of the animals that they saw suffering on the streets around them. Some of them had elaborate philosophies explaining their behavior, some of them had religious ideas, a few were confrontational and felt like they needed to fight for animals because they "couldn't speak for themselves." A couple of them lived pretty marginal lives, subsisting in poverty which was actually complicated because they refused to stop working for the street dogs. The thing that united them was their passion, the fact that they acted directly from their heart, and the fact that they all expressed a profound sadness at the lack of compassion in the world. To me it seemed to be a very pure thing.

When I was in film school, one of the very basic instructions I received in my first directing class was that it is the director's job to make sure that all the actors are "in the same movie." Characters need to match, intensity of performance needs to be at the level appropriate for the film. As I found more of these wild, brilliant, sometimes eccentric characters, I let go of the idea of including the "dog show" crowd. They just weren't in the same movie. Many of my activist friends changed from potential characters to supporting roles, helping me to understand context of the animal situation here, the various options to deal with the issue, and how the animal activist community was organized. I hope to use some of this information to direct people towards the best organizations, places to donate, and other ideas to help the street dogs once the film is released. I've already had many requests for this information, and I hope by the time the film is finished to be able to have something solid in place for this purpose.

The film has been an incredible process so far, and there is still so much to do. I'm lucky that Kolkata is a place that has such, funny, lively, unique people. I think that going along with them on their dog-obsessed journey will make for a good film, and I hope that we can show part of why I've been in love with this city for the last five years.